Description
Compass Rose
by Heather C. Bryant
$14.49, paper
Compass Rose traces a significant year in the poet’s life; the poems delineate an arc of death into life. The collection begins with the poet’s mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. It follows her mother’s illness, death, and burial and remembrance. The chapbook delights in the celebration of life and the unexpected joys to be found amidst deep sorrows. The poems are rooted in love, landscape, and journey. They delight in the power of the word, and in the poet’s discovery of the written word and its ancestors, such as her poem, “Listening to Seamus Heaney.” Ultimately, Compass Rose finds diurnal power in the mundane, power in the extraordinary passage of life into death, and solace again by the healing laps of the ocean. The poems express reverence for the power of human life, for the enduring bonds between parents and children, between mothers and their mothers, between mothers and their sons and daughters.”
Heather Corbally Bryant is a Lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College; previously she taught at Penn State University and Harvard College where she won awards for her teaching. She received her AB from Harvard and her PhD from the University of Michigan. Her first book, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (University of Michigan Press) won the Donald Murphy prize from the ACIS. She has published poems in The Christian Science Monitor, Sixteen, The Paddock Review, Old Frog Pond Chapbooks, Fourth & Sycamore, and in the anthologies: In Another Voice, Open-Eyed, Full-Throated: An Anthology of American/Irish Poets (Dublin: Arlen House, 2019) Cheap Grace, her first chapbook was published by the Finishing Line Press. Her second collection of poems, Lottery Ticket, was published in 2013 by the Parallel Press Series of the University of Wisconsin Libraries-Madison. Her third chapbook, Compass Rose, appeared in 2015 from The Finishing Line Press. My Wedding Dress, her first long collection of poems, was published by The Finishing Line Press in 2016. Thunderstorm, her second full-length volume of poetry, was published by The Finishing Line Press in the fall of 2017. It was nominated for a Mass Book Award in 2018. Her sixth collection of poetry, Eve’s Lament, was published by The Finishing Line Press in the winter of 2018. Her seventh collection of poetry, James Joyce’s Water Closet, (2018) won honorable mention in the Open Chapbook Competition of the Finishing Line Press. Two of her poems, “James Joyce’s Water Closet,” and “The Easterly,” were nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018. Her eighth collection of poetry, “Leaving Santorini,” appeared in 2019. She has given readings at colleges and bookstores across the United States, and in Ireland. She divides her time between Andover, Mass and the Lakes Region in New Hampshire.
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